He shouldn’t have been firing at all. Nor did he have any right to block them in. Considering that it was dark, he could certainly have hit someone by mistake. And a “warning shot DOES = threat”. Which I believe is illegal.
I can see hanging out in a cemetary and just TELLING ghost stories, just for the fun of it. Who doesn’t like a good ghost story, in a really, REALLY scary setting? And even they were some crank-pot types, who cares? They weren’t hurting anything.
ETA: whoa, that place looks creepy. That’d be an AWESOME place to hang out on Halloween! Boo!
Hence the whack of charges he’s facing now. They all seem to be appropriate.
Yeah, I can see the appeal in bringing a Ouija board out there. It would be most fun in the fall though when the leaves make creepy ruslting noises in the wind.
That must be nice living in a self imposed ghetto (I don’t mean ghetto like trashy part of town, I mean ghetto like-- locked in via gates).
Further, if these kids were the gang banging thugs that Mr. Swallows thought they were, um. . . they’d have fucked his shit up for drawing a gun on them.
See, I don’t really care about gun control, one way or the other. Ban all guns, I’m fine with. Don’t ban any guns, I’m fine with that too.
But it seems to me the people who yell loudest about Second Amendment rights have attitudes like the one this assault rifle dude apparently has. Positively gleeful that he has found some “criminals” to play badass on.
True… I encourage the citizens to call. Its difficult to establish a guideline of when to call. I would rather have you err on the side of calling… then not calling. An involved neighborhood makes things better for all of us.
A similar argument could be made about motor vehicles. Personally, I’m much more scared of cars than guns; not only is there an even larger set of morons with them, but the penalties for grievously careless use tend to be much lesser.
I’m as strong an advocate of the right to bear arms as you’ll find around here, and I hope this guy gets prosecuted hard.
I voted and am writing this before I read other responses.
You are fucking kidding me. A private citizen using deadly force when there was no threat to him or anyone else? These kids broke no law. That asshole was playing cops and robbers. A cop may have asked a few questions but would not have held them at gunpoint, and certainly would have no need to call for backup. Walking out of a cemetery is a legal act, even if you’re a teenager, even if there are several of you, even if it is late at night. It is not the same thing as leaving a bank after business hours with the alarms blaring and your hands fully of money.
Just because you own a gun doesn’t mean you can go around deciding who should be detained and when and where.
Crime was at an all-time high in the 1990s in the USA. I believe it is again on the rise. Depends on how much you trust the authorities. Many police officers are under considerable pressure to reduce the crime rate and as a result are charging out crimes in a less severe manner than in the past. It looks good on paper, but here in the Midwest, from my observation, there is a considerably greater amount of crime than decades ago.
Just because the rates are lower than the Nineties doesn’t mean we’re moving in the right direction.
I’m loud second amendment supporter, and I pity poor, violent countries like the one that I’m in where only criminals have guns. My biggest desire for myself (in any country) is to never need to pull out the gun. This guy is a yahoo by any decent second amendment supporter’s standards.
I’m from Tennessee and after electing Blanton as Governor, I don’t really see much more downside for embarrassment on the governorship front. He was hawking pardons like they were tickets for the UT-Vandy game.
IMHO, they probably would. If they weren’t committing a crime, the guy with a gun wasn’t a cop, and they had no other way to safely escape the situation, then the use of lethal force would be justified. Just because he claimed he was holding them until the police came would not reduce the threat they could believe he was posing, especially if he actually fired a round to show he “meant business”. Certainly the fact he’s been charged with aggravated assault false imprisonment means the DA thought he was posing real, tangible threat to his victims.
I’m a non-violent wuss who doesn’t even like being in the room with loaded guns, but if someone is pointing a gun at me and I have access to a firearm, I really hope I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them. IMO, a loaded gun being pointed at you constitutes an imminent threat to your life and you are completely justified in doing whatever you need to do to protect yourself, up to and including killing them.
Take the “held at gunpoint” out of the equation and my opinion changes. You can be shot at long-range, being stabbed or beaten out of arms’ reach is kind of hard. I think I’d prefer fleeing like a bat out of hell in that case.
Being curious about the “assault rifle” (there’s no way in hell he had an honest-to-God assault rifle, i.e. full auto M-16 or AK or he’d be facing a bunch of weapons charges too) I went searching news articles. Turns out he had an AR-15, but along the way I learned:
-Neighbours report there’d been needles and stuff found in the vicinity in the past
-Those kids were up to no good
-Those kids have been have been having bush parties back there
-Swallows is a wonderful neighbour
Which could all be perfectly true, but he’s still got no business pulling out a freaking AR-15 unless he’s being threatened, which I can’t see has been alleged anywhere.
If an 18 year old held a group of 70 year olds hostage with an assault rifle and fired warning shots to keep them submissive with no evidence that they’d committed a crime would you feel the same way?